Megacities for Better and for Worse

Frost & Sullivan forecasts that about 4.5 billion people globally will be living in cities by 2025—about 60% of the world’s total population. The growing urban population will lead to the rapid expansion of city borders into neighboring suburbs, resulting in the formation of Megacities. _GCC

GCC

When you hear about the coming urban age, it's really a story about rising Asia and the two countries that will define this new era of the megacity: China and India. Half of Asia will become urbanized, and nearly a billion people will shift from countryside to cityscape. Trillions of dollars will need to be spent on roads, trains, power plants, water systems, and social services. _FP

That is the projection, anyway. All very nice, clean, and orderly. But really now, what will it be like?

...the high density of people can generate problems, including health issues such as the rapid transmission of 'flu viruses and psychological problems caused by poverty and stress.

But whatever we think of them, megacities are not only here to stay: They're growing. New Delhi, for example, is projected to have 29.49 million inhabitants by 2025, according to Demographia -- up from 20.99 million in 2010. _CNN

Megacities are metropolitan areas containing more than 10 million people.

FP

For better or worse, urban-watchers are clear on one point: The quality of life for most people in the future will be determined by the quality of cities.

Those cities will be bigger than ever. A megacity has more than ten million inhabitants. In 1995 there were 14; in 2015 there will be 21. And the ranking will have shifted: Today the five largest cities are Tokyo, Mexico City, São Paulo, New York City, and Mumbai (Bombay), and in 2015 they will probably be Tokyo, Dhaka, Mumbai, São Paulo, and Delhi.

And yet, population numbers by themselves don't determine a city's prospects; after all, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and Hamburg, Germany, have the same population. Nor is explosive growth necessarily the determining factor. "City problems," one authority points out, "mostly have to do with weak, ineffective, and usually unrepresentative city governments." _NatGeo

Wikipedia article on megacities

Megacities are a dynamic sprawl of human interaction. Some of them will work fairly well, and some of them will fall into the coming anarchy. Dense concentrations of low intelligence humans will not lead to the benefits of cities which Jane Jacobs wrote about. It will lead instead to the less savoury aspects of Sao Paulo, Nairobi, Lagos, and the Paris banlieus.

Cities are complex organisms which must be fed, cleaned, energised, and have their waste hauled away. In the routine and massive power failures of third world cities of today, we see the bare beginnings of the chaos, and a growing potential for devolutional suffering within many of tomorrow's megacities. Not only will both old and emerging diseases spread through these megacities like wildfire, but all other forms of misery -- and inability to recover from more unpredictable catastrophes -- will propagate through these monstrosities.

As the cities of Europe, North America, and parts of Oceania slowly become one with the third world, we will see the same aspects of decay and a brittle inability to recover from setbacks and natural disasters. The disorder ratchets downward, and the "no-go" zones grow larger.

There are limits, of course. But what are the limits? China has no intention of surrendering to the forces of decay -- nor has Japan. But if the compulsively "politically correct" west continues to surrender to and imitate the voracious, corrupt, and undisciplined third world, we will see only sparse archipelagos of order in the middle of a sea of chaos -- where once lived the prosperous and orderly western civilisation.

Amazing technologies are coming, which will allow for a freedom of movement and a shocking abundance of necessities and luxuries. Other technologies may force a temporary shutting down of the "commons", and of free movement in the open air. In the middle of an amazing blooming of new and promising technologies, we will also see numbing cruelty, suffering, and death.

Luck will partially determine who will emerge on the other side, empowered by the best of the new technologies. Planning ahead may also be of use.

As Nations Collapse, City-States Provide Centers of Stability

The 21st century will not be dominated by America or China, Brazil or India, but by the city. In an age that appears increasingly unmanageable, cities rather than states are becoming the islands of governance on which the future world order will be built. This new world is not -- and will not be -- one global village, so much as a network of different ones. _FP

As national governments grow larger and more unwieldy, corruption and dysfunction become the new normal. Huge, clumsy new government agencies prove easier to form than to dismantle. Unionised government workers and power-hungry bureaucratic king-pins refuse to relinquish power or benefits, until huge national governments become the harsh taskmasters of an increasingly dissatisfied populace. The situation grows more unstable until it can no longer sustain itself. At that point, regional islands of stability form focal points for new organisation.

...we have to look back nearly a thousand years, to the medieval age in which cities such as Cairo and Hangzhou were the centers of global gravity, expanding their influence confidently outward in a borderless world. When Marco Polo set forth from Venice along the emergent Silk Road, he extolled the virtues not of empires, but of the cities that made them great. He admired the vineyards of Kashgar and the material abundance of Xi'an, and even foretold -- correctly -- that no one would believe his account of Chengdu's merchant wealth. It's worth remembering that only in Europe were the Middle Ages dark -- they were the apogee of Arab, Muslim, and Chinese glory. _FP

Accelerating this shift toward new regional centers of gravity are port cities and entrepôts such as Dubai, the Venices of the 21st century: "free zones" where products are efficiently re-exported without the hassles of government red tape. Dubai's recent real-estate overreach notwithstanding, emerging city-states along the Persian Gulf are investing at breakneck speed in efficient downtown business districts, offering fast service and tax incentives to relocate. _FP

...the advent of global hubs and megacities forces us to rethink whether state sovereignty or economic might is the new prerequisite for participating in global diplomacy. The answer is of course both, but while sovereignty is eroding and shifting, cities are now competing for global influence alongside states. _FP

The author of the FP piece linked above envisions the rise of the city alongside the continuing power of the nation-state. But conventional contemporary thinkers too often lack the historical perspective which allows the concept of the "rise and fall" of nations to become a tangible reality inside themselves and in their writings.

A large number of nations in Africa and Asia are teetering on the brink of Yugoslavia-style dissolution. Whether illogically slapped-together by imperial conquerors without regard to tribe, language, culture, or religion -- or simply having outgrown whatever bounds held them together up intil now -- these booby-trap nations sit waiting for the right trigger to explode and dissolve in smoke and flames.

Larger nations which are intimately involved with these "booby-trap" nations stand to be hurt badly when the IED-nations explode. A chain reaction of exploding and collapsing states could easily result -- particularly when dysfunctional governments intentionally place their nations in extreme risk via unwise policies of debt and demography.

Things fall apart, yes. But they also put themselves together, afterward. Consider how the pieces may choose to re-organise.